The Hydra Protocol (12 page)

“So are the codes Perimeter uses,” Nadia told him. “Perimeter was given daily ciphers by the KGB. When they were driven from power, they stopped updating its clearances.”

“You mean it’s still running off that pad,” Chapel said.

“As far as Perimeter is concerned, it is still 25 December 1991, because no one told it otherwise.”

Chapel couldn’t help but grin. He nodded at this pad. “You needed this thing pretty badly, I guess.”

“Simply to enter the Perimeter bunker, one needs a code sequence. If it is entered incorrectly, the system automatically arms itself and cannot be reset locally.”

“We’d better make sure we enter the right code, then,” Chapel said.

Nadia’s eyes flashed as if she’d just caught Chapel in something. “So you agree to come with me? To do this together?”

Chapel grinned. “Wouldn’t miss it. Though I’m still not clear on why this is a joint operation. You have the one-time pad—we would give it to you even if you said you wanted to run the rest of this mission yourself. So I’ll ask again. Why do you need us? Why me?”

“As a
svidetel
. A . . . witness, if nothing else,” Nadia told him.

“A witness?”

“If I am successful, if I deactivate Perimeter, there will be no visible sign. Nothing overt will happen. I could turn it off tomorrow, but if I then came back here and told you it was done—”

“We wouldn’t believe you,” Hollingshead said. “Exactly right. The president would have to assume you were lying. Attempting to deceive us so that we would relax our guard.”

“Indeed. Trust, but verify, yes? That is the policy. Once Perimeter is defeated, Agent Chapel can vouch that it was done, and our two countries can start talking about disarmament again. We are going to make the world a safer place,” Nadia said. “Even if only the three of us in this room ever know about it.”

“When do we leave?” Chapel asked.

Nadia was escorted out of the Pentagon by a pair of marine sergeants who weren’t told who she was. On her way out, she turned and glanced back at Chapel. She gave him a hopeful smile that he tried to return. Once she’d turned a corner, he closed the door again and turned to look at Hollingshead.

“You trust her?” he asked.

“I wasn’t without my doubts when she first came to me,” the director said. He laid a hand on Chapel’s artificial shoulder. “I vetted her personally. She’s definitely an agent of FSTEK, though like you she doesn’t show up on their official payroll. Her direct superior, Marshal Bulgachenko, gave a message to our ambassador in Moscow vouching for her. Beyond that she’s a mystery.”

“Is that good enough?”

“In this business if she wasn’t mysterious, I would worry. It’s the best we’re going to get, son.”

Chapel nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Of course, I don’t want you to think I’m selling her the shop, either. Just because the Russians are our allies now doesn’t mean we don’t spy on each other. Even if, as I suspect, she’s completely on the level, she’s got perfectly functional ears. She’ll take any chance she can get to learn things she isn’t supposed to know. It’s vital you don’t give anything away—for instance, she can’t learn about Angel. I know you’re used to relying on our friend while you’re in the field. That won’t fly this time. If she sees you talking to an invisible helper, she’s going to get curious.”

“So I’m going in blind?” Chapel asked. He relied on Angel for
everything
during a field operation—for intelligence, for insights, just for someone watching his back. Working without her would be a severe handicap.

“No. You’ll be able to contact her. You’ll just have to be discreet about it. As in all things.”

“I am a silent warrior,” Chapel said, quoting the motto of the intelligence service.

“I know you are, son. Fair enough. Are you all right with taking Asimova’s lead? This is going to be her operation. You’ll be playing second fiddle, I’m afraid.”

“Understood.”

Hollingshead nodded and turned to go. But then he stopped. He looked back at Chapel with a questioning eye. “There’s just one more thing. It’s, ah. I suppose this isn’t my place. But if it affects your operational efficiency—”

“Sir?”

Hollingshead frowned. “Back there, in the briefing. You seemed . . . angry. That’s not like you. A couple of times there, you got downright confrontational.”

“You have my apologies, sir.”

Hollingshead nodded. “Chapel. Son. I said I wasn’t going to talk about your personal life, and I’ll stick to that. But I need to know you’re truly ready for this. That if I send you into the field right now, your head will be squarely in the game. I expected to find you distracted and a little dazed, given the circumstances.”

“May I ask how I seem right now, sir?”

“Focused. Maybe a little too focused. You’re blocking out everything else but your work. If that becomes a problem—”

“It won’t,” Chapel said. He sounded curt even to his own ears. He hadn’t intended that.

Hollingshead flinched a little. He blinked. Straightened his cuffs. “It’s not too late,” he said. “I can still send someone else on this.”

It wasn’t a threat. Hollingshead was asking a question, Chapel knew. He was offering a lifeline.

Maybe he wasn’t in the perfect head space for a mission like this. But he thought he could get there. And the alternative—going back to an empty apartment in New York, checking his phone every thirty seconds for a call that wasn’t going to come—was unacceptable.

“I can do the job, sir,” he said, forcing a measure of calm into his voice. “I can do it right.”

“Hmm.” Hollingshead looked him right in the eye for an uncomfortably long time. Chapel made sure not to look away. Then the director shook his head as if clearing it of unpleasant thoughts and said, “Very well. Let’s talk about how we get you to Kazakhstan.”

Chapel would have left for the mission then and there, if he could. Unfortunately, the doctors had grounded him for a month after his bout with decompression sickness, and Hollingshead wouldn’t let him fly until it was safe. The intervening time wouldn’t be wasted. Papers had to be readied, cover stories established, travel arrangements made. The hardest part was that Chapel could do so little of it himself. Most of the preparations were made by low-level functionaries in the State Department who had no idea what they were working on, only that credentials for certain people had to be readied at the shortest possible notice. Chapel would never even meet the people working on his behalf.

Chapel’s official orders were to get some sleep. The best therapy for the bends was sleep and fluids. Chapel tried to maximize the latter, keeping a water bottle with him at all times, but he knew he couldn’t just sleep away the remaining time. He checked into a hotel in Washington—it was far too tempting to go back to New York, to try to find Julia and talk to her—and spent his days haunting various military archives.

A long couple of weeks at the Military Intelligence records center, huddled over computer screens and microfiche terminals, left him with a stiff back but little wiser. He looked for anything the DoD had on the Dead Hand system and came up with nothing of consequence. The best intelligence analysts of the Cold War had determined that, yes, the system existed and, yes, it was functional, but that was it—two things he hadn’t doubted since Hollingshead told him as much at the start of his briefing. U2 spy planes, reconnaissance satellites, even human intelligence—spies on the ground—had failed for thirty years to turn up anything concrete beyond those two facts. He did discover one thing new. In the 1970s, Project Azorian had recovered part of a Soviet nuclear submarine from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The Project’s findings had been limited—the sub broke into pieces while it was being hauled up—and as far as the public knew, nothing significant had been learned. In a top secret file, though, Chapel found out that Azorian had recovered the warhead from a Soviet ICBM and that for years afterward it had been carefully dismantled and every aspect of its hardware and software studied in secret American labs. There was a great deal of technical data there that Chapel couldn’t begin to comprehend, but one piece of paper near the back of the file indicated that an unexpected module was found inside the warhead’s control bus, little more than a single computer chip designed to accept commands received by shortwave radio. The module was completely isolated from the rest of the warhead’s electronics and had the capacity to arm, direct, and launch the missile by remote command. The scientists who found it believed it was there because the Soviet leadership didn’t trust their own people to launch the missiles when the time came. To Chapel, though, the presence of that module meant something else. It meant that Nadia’s story was true. That the Dead Hand—Perimeter, as he increasingly called it in his head—was completely capable of launching a nuclear strike, even now.

Everything Nadia had said in her briefing checked out, as far as it was possible to verify such things. He’d had no reason to suspect she was lying, but he was glad to have some confirmation.

That evening he took dinner at his hotel and then retired to his room. He switched on the television, not even really caring what was on. Eventually he fell asleep.

The next day he spent talking with Angel, on his phone, asking her to look into a few things for him. She said she would get back to him as soon as possible, but that the answers he wanted would take time. He went for a very long swim, something he always did when there were too many thoughts in his head.

He ate lunch, and then dinner, lingering over the meals.

He checked his phone a couple of hundred times. Nobody was calling him.

The next day he started again, looking at records that had been stamped secret and sealed for decades—whether or not there was any new information in them.

And the day after that he did it again.

The month he spent in Washington was hell. It was unbearable. He needed to be out in the field, away from memories and regrets. Away from any place Julia had ever been.

One day he went in for a medical examination. The doctors cleared him to fly. He did not waste any more time—there was a flight from Ronald Reagan International leaving that evening.

Hollingshead bought him a beer at a bar downtown, but he didn’t even finish it. He was too keyed up. It was time to go.

Forty thousand feet above the Atlantic, in the business class section of a 777, the lights had been turned down and all was quiet. Chapel couldn’t sleep. He’d never been good at sleeping on planes, and now he had enough on his mind to keep him awake anyway. He pulled on his headphones and switched on his tablet. Launched an audio player and loaded a language file. He was never going to get fluent in another language in the time frame of this operation, but he could at least pick up a few essentials.

“
Qos keldiñiz!
Welcome.” The voice on the recording was flat, unaccented. He’d hoped to use the excellent audio files the army used to train its translators, but Hollingshead had nixed that. Chapel and Nadia were undercover, posing as an American businessman and his Russian assistant. If customs officials checked Chapel’s tablet and found military software on it, there would be questions, and that was unacceptable.

“
Tanisqanimizğa qwaniștimin!
I am pleased to meet you.” So Chapel had been limited to commercially available language products, and finding one for Kazakh in a hurry had been difficult. He was forced to make do with a digitized version of an old language tape that was mostly just a list of common phrases and their English equivalents.

“
Men tüsinbeymin
. Sorry, I didn’t get that.” Chapel smiled to himself. He was going to need that one a lot. He remembered when he’d had to learn Pashto, back when he was first shipping out to Afghanistan. He’d thrown himself into that language, immersed himself in it night and day. “I don’t understand” had quickly become his most commonly used phrase.

“
Osini jazip bere alasiz ba?
Can you write that down for me?” He’d been a different person back then. So committed to his job. So desperate for a chance to head overseas and do his part, to track down Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice after 9/11. He hadn’t been a real soldier then, not quite. Years in Ranger school and then at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, where they trained him in intelligence work, had left him feeling more like a student than a warrior. He’d had both arms back then, too.

“
Keșiriñiz!
I beg your pardon.” For a brief while he’d gotten to be a real soldier. A silent warrior. It hadn’t lasted long enough. What was he now? He sometimes wondered. The jobs Hollingshead found for him weren’t classical intelligence work—no dead drops or clandestine meetings in parking garages, no miniaturized cameras up his sleeves. His work didn’t follow the comfortable pattern of military life, either. He didn’t report to a commanding officer. He didn’t get direct orders from anyone wearing a uniform. Now he was an invisible warrior, not just a silent one. Now he was flying to Bucharest in preparation for sneaking into a foreign country and carrying out illegal sabotage. Now he was the kind of person Julia couldn’t love anymore—

“
Sizben bïlewge bola ma?
Would you care to dance?”

Chapel flinched in his seat. That wasn’t the same voice he’d been listening to. It was sultry and velvety and sent a chill down his neck.

“Sorry to break in on the lesson, sweetie,” Angel said. “I just figured now would be a good time to check up on you. Don’t say anything; just lie back and listen, okay?”

Chapel glanced over at Nadia. She was curled up in her seat with the back reclined as far as it would go. Sleeping like a baby. She was even snoring—if she was faking it, she was doing an excellent job.

“Nobody can hear me,” Angel told him. “You hear that faint hiss in the background? That’s not just because the recording quality on your language file is so cruddy. I’m pumping some pink noise into this connection so that even the little bit of sound that leaks from your headphones won’t make sense to anyone listening. We’re safe, communicating like this. The director told me how important it was that we keep things on the quiet side.”